If something in the past, like owning a slave, was accepted at the time. Was it wrong back then or is it just wrong for us looking back on it?
"Your opinion is wrong, according to the facts."
- Ankylo-01
Right and wrong is a matter of accuracy, not morality. "Morally right/wrong" is a myth, as is "owning property".
So "owning" a "slave" is never "morally wrong", just like rape and genocide is never "morally wrong"... or "morally right".
Morality is about good and evil and rape is evil. "Enslaving" people is not quite as evil as say kidnapping someone, chaining them up in a room and feeding them for years (like in The Collector with Terence Stamp) but it's definitely not good.
"Need" is just a fiction. As is "should", "must", "value" and "importance".
Yes. Why?
shareBecause I am curious.
"Your opinion is wrong, according to the facts."
- Ankylo-01
"Norm" has nothing to do with right or wrong. It's simply something that is 'norm'ally done.
shareValue judgments are subjective. Nothing is factually right or wrong.
shareIn some form, slavery will exist till the Lord comes back. Most of us work for someone else, which is a form of slavery. It is different from abusive slavery, depending on for whom a person is working, in that the slave is recompensed. Many of the emancipated American slaves stayed with their masters, while others had nowhere to go and did not know what to do and missed the way it had been. All things considered, slavery should be abolished everywhere, but the societal transition is always stressful.
shareRelativism in any form is self-defeating.
It asserts absolutely that all forms of absolutism are wrong except of course the one it proposes, so it presupposes a special-pleading fallacy for its own absolutism. It's self-contradictory and incoherent.
A quote by Frithjof Schuon should suffice:
Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility.
--
I want a unicorn. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1MKQbNPkgU
It asserts absolutely that all forms of absolutism are wrong except of course the one it proposes
What is "absolutism" referring to there, exactly?
I'm a relativist, by the way. So you're claiming that relativism says that something about relativism is "absolute." What (property), exactly, is "absolute" picking out?